I once made an effect where I had this shading on a surface that looked like you could place a stone or gem into and it looked like it was a holder for it. I can't find the tool I did it with so I'm wondering what other people think about how you would get the effect.

I'm not sure how that would help. I have an icon and a number over the icon with a background, 3 layers. I have to move the icons around and then move the numbers on top of the icons around and I always have to readjust the alignment to make everything just right. It would be good to keep everything aligned the first time I align it and then align the carrier icon to where I need it to go later on. Copying and pasting a selection doesn't mean I can keep my stuff aligned from what I can tell.
I have Align Object and Align Object plugins, they both seem to do the same thing and they don't align objects to other objects in different layers, so it doesn't help me there. I seriously have to look at the coordinate positions and zoom in to make sure I'm pixel perfect every time I move anything. And then move the overlaying graphics the same amount of pixels.

Is it possible to make paint.net capable of selecting multiple layers at a time and then select a region and move all the pixels from each of the layers? I expect if you could do this then you could apply effects to to that selection as well and have the effect applied to all pixels on each layer.
If this is possible, I think this would make work flow a lot quicker. Thanks for considering it.

Compare compressed file to compressed file. Your compressed video was 278MB and my compressed image of 20 layers is 93MB. So your video is 3x the size of the image while it is compressed and if it was decompressed then I'd imagine they'd be a little closer to each other's value since the image file has a ton of transparency and the video has a regular distribution of variation throughout it's content.

That's awesome! I'm glad to hear it.
One thing though, isn't tiling the image different from rendering a collection of pixels that touch each other based on their top-left corner position? If the entire image is coded based on only what is there, then tiling would break up the continuity of the pixels that touch each other. You could connect sparse pieces together by drawing a direct line of transparency to every group of pixels separated by transparency and render the whole image as one group of pixels where only the pixels that have information are stored and the few lines of transparency that connect them and the coordinate position of the top-left most pixel with respect to the canvas.
That's what I thought would erase storing all the transparency information. I don't understand what the tiling represents, so I can't say what it means but I'm trying to make my "coordinate position" idea more clear since they seem to be doing different things in my mind.

Ah, now it makes sense. Why shouldn't there be a way to "compress" the layers in memory? What you are saying is that paint.net treats every layer as a whole new image, but what if it didn't. What if it only considered the graphics that were there and gave coordinate positions to each separate graphic? Then it wouldn't need to store or decompress all that transparency.

Again, there isn't reason to believe that a 93.2MB file decompresses to 3.3GB. There must be something else happening beyond compression. Maybe it's how paint.net remembers the layering of the image, so compressing a pdn file actually gets much higher compression ratios than a single image?

You uh, your example is a full white...image. How is that an example? Most images don't experience more than 20% compression if they have enough detail. I can understand how business logos and basic graphic designs may get more, based on compression because they have more similar tones but photos and most paintings don't get more than 20% generally.

So you're saying that the 93.2MB is the compressed form, but then does that mean it is actually 3.3GB in size without compression? I thought compression only gets you 5-20% space saved. This would be a 72% compression ratio which means there must be something else going on.

Ok, real quick. The file size of the pdn in question is 93.2MB. My total memory available is 7.4GB and paint.net uses 0.1GB of RAM on start up. But when I load the 93.2MB pdn with only 20 layers, the memory usage goes up 3.3GB! That's 3x the size of the original pdn. Now I don't know what goes on under the hood and what is required to do everything but first impression: that seems to be quite excessive. Utilizing 3.3GB of ram for a 1GB file when paint.net by itself only uses 0.1GB? Doesn't seem to make sense.

Now hold up. This is what I got doing that:
I resized it from 1024 x 781 to 2000 x (maintained ratio) using Nearest Neighbor, then I resized it back to the size using nearest neighbor. Then I pasted the original image in the top layer and gave it XOR blend mode and got this. When I doubled the size and then halved the size it did give me a black screen in the blend mode though. So I guess it only works with doubling and halving the size.

I think I understand at this point, that the only way to resize an image in a lossless way is to save the original image and always resize from that. So it makes sense that paint.net would not hold onto every image like this. But yeah, I can just hold onto all the images I need.

So let's say I have a 1200 x 1200 pixel image and I resize it to 2400 x 2400. If I undo the resize I expect that I could resize and undo the resize over and over with no loss of information right?
But let's say I save the image and then reopen the image and resize it back to the 1200 x 1200 resolution. Would this then be lossy? And if so, wouldn't there be a way to make it not lossy if all the transformations are done within paint.net? Couldn't you effectively reverse the resize transformation regardless?
Maybe it isn't lossy! Let me know how paint.net handles these sorts of things.

I got my answer I needed. If you need to trouble shoot do you want me to send my crash logs to the crash log email address? At this point, I just make sure that I am not running too many programs at the same time.

I don't know what is going on. I just wanted to know how to increase the memory of the paint.net. But apparently it doesn't limit itself but it will use everything available. Of course I have a 64bit OS to have 8GB of ram.

I only have this laptop. And it's on its last leg and wouldn't be worth investing in it. I might as well buy a new one when this one finally dies.
But I'm guessing from the first reply that paint.net will use whatever is available and isn't limiting itself to a specific amount of ram. And this is what I needed to know. I thought it might be limiting itself but I guess a 2400 DPI image is a lot of memory to work with and I should close out all other programs while working on it.

I've never done vector images before. I'm trying Inkscape and it doesn't have the same tools. It seems to treat the pixels differently. At this point, I can make much more progress with paint.net saving every 5 minutes than learning something new. But I will see whether it can do what I need.